They Eat Horses, Don't They? Read online

  SERGE GAINSBOURG, FRENCH SINGER (1928–91)

  Official disapproval of smoking has resulted in a certain amount of retrospective censorship, a revisionist approach that outrages those who prefer to see their nicotine-stained past through smoke without mirrors. In 2005, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre was deprived of his second-best companion after Simone de Beauvoir by the French National Library, which airbrushed the cigarette he was pictured holding from the publicity posters of an exhibition dedicated to him. The French Post Office recently retouched a postage stamp featuring the celebrated French novelist and diplomat André Malraux, by removing his beloved clope. And the latest victim of the censor’s stroke was none other than former president Jacques Chirac, whose memoirs were withheld from publication until the front cover – which had featured him in pensive pose with cigarette in hand – was changed. (Nobody to date, however, has ventured to suggest that images of Serge Gainsbourg be Photoshopped to remove the inevitable fag – presumably because to do so would be a form of cultural blasphemy.)

  For their part, French film-makers see the restrictions on lighting up on screen as heralding a new, dark age of censorship and the fettering of artistic expression. For many in the French pro-smoking camp, puffing a cigarette is the ultimate gesture of memento mori, the post-modern equivalent of an Old Master vanitas painting of a skull beside a bowl of fruit (or other symbols of the transience of all Earthly things). It is the ultimate act of sheer hedonism, indulgence in the pleasure of a moment that carries with it the shadow of impending mortality. To defend such forbidden pleasure becomes an act of defiance against Anglo-American political correctness and health fascism, a Gallic stand for freedom: eat, drink, smoke and be merry, for tomorrow we die.*

  * Or, as the French might say, Cueille le jour présent en fumant, sans te soucier du lendemain.

  Myth Evaluation: True.

  THE FRENCH ARE CRUEL TO ANIMALS

  Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind.

  ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, FRENCH POET, DRAMATIST AND POLITICIAN (1790–1869)

  Among the many things for which the French are known and celebrated, sentimentality towards animals is not one. The standard Anglo-Saxon view of the French, in fact, is that of a country of hunters prepared to shoot and kill anything that moves, in order to put its head on the wall and its body on a plate. This view is not a new one by any means. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, in his journal Travels through France and Italy, Tobias Smollett observed with distaste:

  ‘You may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever. All is silent and solitary. The poor birds are destroyed, or driven for refuge, into other countries, by the savage persecution of the people, who spare no pains to kill, and catch them for their own subsistence. Scarce a sparrow, red-breast, tomtit, or wren, can scape the guns and snares of those indefatigable fowlers. Even the noblesse make parties to go à la chasse, a-hunting; that is, to kill those little birds, which they eat as gibier, or game.’

  The image of the ruthless Gallic hunter bent on sacrificing our helpless furry and feathered friends in the interests of the pleasures of the table persists in Anglo-Saxon popular culture to this day, most recently in the form of the insane female flic Chantel DuBois in the 2012 Dreamworks animation Madagascar 3. From the late twentieth century onwards, animal rights protesters have frequently pointed the finger at France for excessive cruelty to animals, citing such notorious bêtes noires of animal welfare as the production of that infamous national delicacy, foie gras, or the country’s devotion to inhumanely reared crated veal.

  When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her?

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, FRENCH PHILOSOPHER (1533–92)

  There is no denying that a few traditional French foods* do involve a measure of cruelty in their methods of production.

  * Horsemeat, which also comes into this category, is dealt with in a separate chapter (see here)

  Foie gras – literally, ‘fattened liver’ – is notoriously produced by gavage, or the force-feeding of geese and ducks through a tube inserted into the oesophagus, to create an artificially distended liver. Despite the protestations of producers, there seems to be little doubt that the process is deeply uncomfortable and, probably, dangerous for the fowl concerned. Foie gras production by force-feeding has been banned in a number of European countries, including Britain, with many public institutions taking the offending delicacy off their menus (including the Houses of Lords and Commons, to name but two). The French response, typically, has been to convert a culinary anomaly into a cultural exception: the French rural code states: ‘Foie gras belongs to the protected cultural and gastronomical heritage of France.’ Nor are the French less recalcitrant over the consumption of veal, condemned by animal rights activists as a meat all too frequently produced in appalling factory conditions. Blanquette de veau (veal in a viscous white sauce) has traditionally been and is likely to remain, for some considerable time, the French national dish.*

  * Though blanquette de veau has recently been challenged by magret de canard (see here). This is unlikely to be seen as a positive development by animal rights activists, since the latter is a duck dish produced from the meat of fowl that have been fattened by gavage, and whose livers are used for foie gras.

  Do the French see animals differently? As far as animals destined for the dinner table are concerned, it seems, yes. Many visitors to France have referred to a ‘Paris exception’ on the dining front, necessitating the suspension of certain ethical commitments towards animal welfare if one is to partake of the authentic French gastronomic experience.19 And certainly, meat occupies a hallowed place in French cuisine. Out of the eight favourite dishes of France, seven are unequivocally of the fleshly kind, involving red meat or poultry.20 Less than 2 per cent of French people are vegetarian, contrasted with 3.2 per cent of Americans and 6 per cent of the animal-loving British (although vegetarianism is reportedly on the rise in France, as elsewhere, not least as a result of the ‘Horsegate’ crisis).†21

  † The country with by far the largest vegetarian population is India, with 40 per cent of the population eschewing meat-eating for mainly religious reasons

  Recently, the French government provoked a storm of protest from vegetarians by issuing a set of protein requirements for school canteens, which in practice excluded vegetarian and vegan diets. Meat-eating, it would seem, is as quintessentially French as a plate of steak-frites.

  As for the proverbial French mania for hunting, it is true that the French are avid fans of the chase. Hunting, or la chasse, is the second biggest leisure pursuit in France.22 And – unlike in the United Kingdom – hunting in France is not exclusive to the upper echelons of society. La chasse à courre, or hunting with horses and hounds, is and always has been the preserve of the privileged few; but the majority of hunters in France are not toffs on horseback in jodhpurs and red jackets, but farmers, manual labourers and ordinary working people, rambling the fields on foot with a rifle to shoot a pigeon, rabbit or hare for the family pot.23 The continued popularity of hunting in France is a reflection of a society that still has – relative to the UK, at least – a significant rural population. Hunting, in fact, is an official way of maintaining the rural French ecosystem. The French Hunters’ Federation has the primary duty of controlling the population of pests like rabbits, foxes, pigeons and wild boar, and every year pays out thousands of euros in compensation to irate farmers for the failure of local hunters to eradicate crop-trampling, munching and crunching four-footed and feathered interlopers. In 2011, for example, it handed over the tidy sum of €50 million. This is a cushy deal for French farmers (who are often in rural communities the hunters as well, not to mention the judge and/or injured party in the local court…).24

  But the French lack of sentimentality
towards the animals they eat does not mean that they are generally uncaring about animals not destined for the pot. With over 61 million pets, the French are the biggest pet owners in Europe: 36 million fish head the list, followed by over 10 million cats and more than 7 million dogs (the French Bulldog has been supplanted by the Labrador as the most frequently insured pet dog, while common-or-garden moggies predictably head the cat list, followed by Persian cats).25 There are also literally hundreds of flourishing animal rights organizations in France – of which the flagship Fondation Brigitte Bardot is the most notorious – fighting for everything from banning the seal trade to saving tired horses from the knacker’s yard. As with so many aspects of Gallic life, French society is divided by a Cartesian dualism on the animal welfare front: for all the rabbit-shooting, bull-baiting, foie gras-consuming inhabitants in rural areas, there are as many urbane, sushi-eating rescuers of enslaved circus animals in the cities.

  A good illustration of this bitter internecine conflict was the recent debacle over La Corrida, or bullfighting, a 150-year old tradition originally brought from Spain to Bayonne, and which is still hugely popular in southern France. After spending months in 2012 hearing the opposing arguments over La Corrida, the French Constitutional Court ruled that it was to be preserved as a French cultural exception – despite the fact that most French people believe that bullfighting should be banned.

  So the consensus on the French and their attitude to animals, predictably, is that there is no consensus. Perhaps the truth of the matter ultimately is that, with a few exceptions of undoubted cruelty which mainly relate to ancient and time-honoured French practices of significant importance to local economies, the French are not so much cruel to animals, as more willing to make a distinction between the animal de compagnie (animal companion) and those destined for human consumption. So, while the French are more likely to adopt a rational and unsentimental attitude to the cow on their plate, they are as likely as anybody else to anthropomorphize, idolize, drool over and buy diamond collars for their pampered pets. The former’s welfare is more an issue of good animal husbandry than the suffering of a friend;* but as to the latter, no praise is high enough. For, in the words of the nineteenth-century French historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine: ‘I’ve met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.’

  * In other words, the French take farm animal welfare into consideration not primarily as an aspect of the animal’s suffering but rather from the point of view that a happy, meadow-fed cow is likely to produce sweeter milk and more succulent, nutritious beef than its factory-farmed, hormone-fed, BSE-ridden counterpart.

  Myth Evaluation: False.

  PART 6

  LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ

  MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH HISTORY AND SOCIETY

  THE FRENCH ARE A NATION OF REVOLUTIONARIES

  Louis XVI: So what is it, a riot?

  Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt: No, sire, it is a revolution.

  EXCHANGE AT VERSAILLES DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  There are few world events that have had as enormous an impact on cultural and political consciousness as the French Revolution of 1789. For those who lived through it – in France and abroad – the event defined the hopes and fears of the age. For some, the French Revolution was a beacon of light that gave a world crushed under the weight of aristocratic privilege and monarchical tyranny a hope of freedom; for others, it was the ultimate horror story of carnage unleashed by the abandoning of the established social order to the whims of the mob. Thus, while poets such as William Wordsworth waxed lyrical ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!’,1 English politicians such as Edmund Burke saw a darker side to events unfolding across the Channel. Burke’s treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) remains to this day one of the most cogent articulations of a ‘conservative’ position, viewing a gradual process of organic social change as preferable to the violent upheavals of revolution. He was confronted by a swift retort in the form of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), an equally cogent argument for a constitution based on reason, guaranteeing the natural rights of man.

  The predominant contemporary view in England, however, was that Britain was a safe and prosperous haven compared to the horrors of what was going on in France; and thanks to the vivid picture of the Revolution portrayed in Charles Dickens’ historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), popularized by Hollywood movies such as the 1935 adaptation by Jack Conway, that is how it has largely remained in the English popular imagination. For a large sector of the British public, the French Revolution is synonymous with the atrocities committed during a very short period – the Terror of 1793–4, during which the climactic scenes of Dickens’ novel are set. In the words of the historian Eric Hobsbawm:

  ‘In Britain… this was the image of the Revolution that came closest to entering public consciousness, thanks to Carlyle and Dickens’s (Carlyle-inspired) A Tale of Two Cities, followed by pop-literary epigones like Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel: the knock of the guillotine’s blades, the sansculotte women knitting impassively as they watched the counter-revolutionary heads fall.’2

  As recently as 2012, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was able to play on these violent and negative associations in a speech comparing France’s Socialist government with the revolutionary sans-culottes over their treatment of the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. Johnson’s speech showed that even today, France is seen as a dangerous and mercurial harbourer of revolutionary sentiment, in contrast with the stable, business-friendly environment of shopkeeping Britain.

  It is certainly true that the blood of rebellion against authority runs hot in French veins – so hot, indeed, that it must be considered a key element of the country’s national DNA. Even now, well over two hundred years after the storming of the Bastille, Gallic citizens will be up in arms at the drop of a beret against some form of repression or other. In fact, the natural instinct of the French when faced with something of which they don’t approve is to hit the streets. Thus, feminists in 2011 staged a demonstration against French media coverage of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair; in 2012, a group of random French people marched in protest at the French government’s expulsion of gypsies; and in 2013, thousands of ordinary French people took to the streets to voice either their support for or objection to the government’s proposals to allow gay people full rights to marry (the highly controversial project known as mariage pour tous). Even at a local level, the French are never slow to get together and noisily protest. For example, parents at a school in our area once demonstrated against a headmaster who was seen as excessively strict; and pupils at another local school recently saw fit to protest against a Spanish teacher whom they claimed was incompetent. In the latter case, the pupils elected a fifteen-year-old representative to put forward a ‘plan of action’, to reform aspects of the school administration that they considered inadequate. In fact, not a day goes by in France without some group or other of enfants de la patrie taking up arms against repression: a confrontational approach to political issues from national to local level that raises the eyebrows of their more phlegmatic neighbours across the English Channel.

  The right to strike is not a right, but a duty!

  JEAN-MARIE GOURIO, FRENCH SCRIPTWRITER (b.1956), BRÈVES DE COMPTOIR, 1988

  Taking to the barricades, in fact, holds a sacred place in French history and culture well beyond the 1789 Revolution. Worker revolt has traditionally been romanticized by French writers, the most classic example perhaps being Émile Zola’s incendiary novel Germinal (1885), with its grim portrayal of the wretched lives of miners in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, toiling blindly at the coalface while the wealthy, mine-owning bourgeoisie crack open champagne bottles and lobsters in their mansions above ground. Germinal (named after a spring month in the Revolutionary calendar), and based on the real-life strike of miners at Anzin in 1884, made no bones about sowing the seeds of a proletarian rev
olution. The last lines of the novel evoke the apocalyptic image of a final workers’ uprising to end all uprisings, in a future mutinous Armegeddon that had the French bourgeoisie of the time seething with rage and alarm.*

  * The 1993 film Germinal by Claude Berri, starring Gérard Depardieu, captures something of the gritty realism of the original novel.

  Zola was accused by the French press of being an ‘artist without a conscience’, who had ‘sown the seeds of revolt to the four corners of the earth’.3 It was alleged that Germinal inspired a number of worker uprisings in the 1880s, including a savage strike of miners at Aveyron in 1886, which involved the defenestration of the mine’s deputy director.

  SOME CAMPAIGN SLOGANS OF MAY 1968 (skip)

  L’été sera chaud! (‘Summer will be hot!’)

  La barricade ferme la rue mais ouvre la voie (‘Barricades close the street but open the way’)

  Même si Dieu existait, il faudrait le supprimer (‘Even if God existed, He would have to be abolished’)

  On achète ton bonheur. Vole-le. (‘They are buying your happiness. Steal it’)

  Métro, boulot, dodo (‘Subway, work, sleep’; slogan decrying the bourgeois humdrum)

  L’imagination prend le pouvoir (‘Imagination takes power’)

  Soyez réaliste, demandez l’impossible (‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible’)

  The twentieth century, in its turn, saw another, albeit less bloody explosion of the French revolutionary spirit – the événements of May 1968. This epoch-making moment in French history began quite modestly, with protests by students at the University of Nanterre against the university administration. These protests spread like wildfire, leading to pitched battles between police and students in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Soon, strikes broke out all over France, culminating in a vast general strike. Fearing civil war or another revolution, the then president, Charles de Gaulle, fled to a military base in Germany before returning in June to dissolve the National Assembly and call for new legislative elections. This proved to be a political masterstroke. Naturally, it was much harder for the students to keep on protesting about government oppression when the president had agreed to submit to the popular vote, and so the protest movement petered out; not, however, without leaving behind some of the world’s most poetic and memorable campaign slogans.